Magners Man: Irish Cider, Representations of Masculinity and the "Burning Celtic Soul"

In this paper we go in search of the Celtic Soul, tracking its historical intertwining with, and relation to, Irish masculinity, from Ireland's pre-colonial past to its colonial days and finally to its postcolonial present. We argue that the Celtic soul manifests itself, with great success, in the Magners Irish Cider advertising campaign. As a key part of our analysis we also illustrate how representations of the Irish Celt serve as a means of enabling young male consumers to reconcile the many tensions and contradictions they are experiencing over what it means to perform ideals of masculinity in contemporary western culture.

English Cathedrals: Events and Spiritual Capital

This paper investigates the recent trend for cathedrals in England to develop a wider and more ambitious scope to their event and activity programmes. It sets out to explore the types of events now hosted at cathedrals, to consider barriers to such ambitions and the opportunities presented by event programming to develop new audiences and grow attendances. The research focuses on the 42 Anglican cathedrals of England and has involved a review of recent reports published by church and cathedral organisations, supported by an in-depth review of event activity and objectives at five selected cathedrals in southern England. Despite declining general church attendance in England, cathedrals have enjoyed two decades of attendance growth both as places of worship and as tourist attractions, partly a reflection of a more complex contemporary search for multi-faceted types of spirituality. The paper explores how events can tap into the realm of individual spiritual capital and demonstrates the rich diversity of events now being hosted by cathedrals. The paper offers a new categorisation of ecclesiastical/liturgical events, cultural and community events and openly commercial event activity. Barriers remain but key facilitating factors have been new investment in event expertise and professionalism, encouragement to experiment by key funding bodies such as the Heritage Lottery Fund and the embracing of new forms of spirituality. The diversity of cathedral events reflects a new found growth in the nurturing of “spiritual capital” amongst both worshippers and tourists.

Statistically robust representation and comparison of mortality profiles in archaeozoology

Archaeozoological mortality profiles have been used to infer site-specific subsistence strategies. There is however no common agreement on the best way to present these profiles and confidence intervals around age class proportions. In order to deal with these issues, we propose the use of the Dirichlet distribution and present a new approach to perform age-at-death multivariate graphical comparisons. We demonstrate the efficiency of this approach using domestic sheep/goat dental remains from 10 Cardial sites (Early Neolithic) located in South France and the Iberian Peninsula. We show that the Dirichlet distribution in age-at-death analysis can be used: (i) to generate Bayesian credible intervals around each age class of a mortality profile, even when not all age classes are observed; and (ii) to create 95% kernel density contours around each age-at-death frequency distribution when multiple sites are compared using correspondence analysis. The statistical procedure we present is applicable to the analysis of any categorical count data and particularly well-suited to archaeological data (e.g. potsherds, arrow heads) where sample sizes are typically small.